CASA DEL ZORRO READIES FOR JUNE OPENING
RESORT READIES FOR JUNE OPENING

New owners of the long-shuttered Casa del Zorro resort are busy completing $1.4 million in improvements to the Borrego Springs property so that it will be ready for a mid-June opening.

They had intended to open in early May, in advance of the Memorial Day weekend, but a required upgrade of the resort’s computer system ended up delaying those plans, explained Jack Giacomini, one of three San Diego partners who purchased the 42-acre resort in January for $2.4 million. The other two investors are former San Diego City Manager Jack McGrory, now CEO of La Jolla Management LLC, a real estate and investment company, and Casey Brown, a San Diego developer.

“Yes, we were disappointed we couldn’t open by Memorial Day weekend, but we’d rather open when everything is guest-ready so there’s the least likelihood of any breakdown with the system,” he said. “Everything has to be perfect when we open.”

Casa del Zorro, which includes 44 hotel rooms and 19 stand-alone casitas, last changed hands in 2007, when Greg Pearlman purchased it for $2.5 million and subsequently invested an additional $7 million in renovations. A little more than a year later, the resort, which he had renamed Borrego Springs Ranch, closed and has remained so until now.

Because of the heavy investment in earlier renovations, the new owners have no need to redo the guest rooms or the public areas, said Giacomini, chairman of San Diego-based Hotel Managers Group.

However, they are undertaking a number of infrastructure upgrades, such as re-tiling and resurfacing all of the pools and adapting them for disabled access. The resort has more than 27 bodies of water, including a pool and/or spa for each of the casitas, plus four much larger pools.

In addition to the pool work, the new ownership is overhauling the heating, ventilation and cooling systems and redoing much of the landscaping, which had become overgrown, Giacomini said. New plantings, designed to give the resort an “oasis”-like feel, include barrel cactus, palm and olive trees, oleanders and wisteria.

While the resort previously had gained a reputation for being exclusive and costly, past room rates that had been as high as $400 a night will now range from $225 to $250 a night during the high season, according to Giacomini. And some rooms could be priced under $200. During the hotter months, rates will be discounted 25 percent, he added.

The hotel’s new website should be ready by May 15 when it will start taking reservations.

“The previous owner’s business plan was to make the resort very high-end because they were going to build and sell second homes out here for the wealthy and semiretired,” said Giacomini. “And locals weren’t welcome at the bar and restaurant any longer because you had to be a guest of the hotel. They had the wrong business model in the wrong location at the very worst time in the economic cycle.”

He expects that Casa del Zorro will be a big draw for people from the greater Los Angeles area looking for a quiet escape or for businesses in need of a corporate retreat. It will fill a niche, he said, that is different from what is offered in the more-urban Palm Springs area.

The resort includes almost 6,000 square feet of enclosed meeting and banquet facilities, a large fitness room, six tennis courts, a two-story renovated spa building with six treatment rooms, a giant chessboard, shuffleboard and boccie ball court, an archery range and a rock-climbing wall.

Built in the 1940s, the resort was owned for more than four decades by The Copley Press, owner of the former San Diego Union-Tribune, until it sold the property in 2007 to Pearlman.

Giacomini said he is looking to partner with a major hotel chain in order to brand the resort and take advantage of its central reservation system.